Hide Empty Staff – strange behaviour

I have a piece with soprano and alto lines (appearing with a brace) and organ.

Music in the alto line is only in the middle of the piece.

I set hiding in layout options and the empty alto line correctly hides on page 1. The middle pages where the alto line has music, correctly show. In the final verse, the alto is tacet until the very end. However, 3 previous systems containing empty alto staves are not hidden.

If I use the hide staves dialogue on the system break of the first empty alto line, it hides not only that system, but also every system until the end, including the final bars which contain music, and past further system breaks.

Am I missing something or is this something which needs sorting?

If you’ve manually hidden staves, you can reset them at a later point to make sure they appear again (use the Reset option in the dialog).

If otherwise-apparently-empty staves are appearing when the layout option for hide empty staves is set, it’s likely there’s something on those staves that is causing them to appear. For a vocal staff, a common culprit is a lyric with duration, which you can fix by temporarily inputting a note immediately after the last note on that staff, re-open the lyrics popover on the final lyric, then extend it to the temporary note. Close the popover, delete the temporary note. (Essentially changing the lyric’s duration so it ends properly where you want it to.) Otherwise, check for any other items, explicit rests, signposts etc that might be causing the staff to appear.

Thank you so much for replying and I apologise for not having seen this. For some reason, it didn’t flag up and it simply didn’t appear. You were right – there was an errant half-note rest which appeared to be a default. Now sorted – thanks.

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